5. Chapter Five #4
“Because it should’ve been him,” Ryowoon says, seethes. “He should have died. Not your dad. Not uncle. Why did uncle—” He sucks in a shaking breath, his jaw trembling. “Why did uncle have to be the one to die!”
He’s yelling too now, both of us screaming in this stupid little clearing in our stupid borrowed suits with blood on Ryowoon’s hands and unshed tears burning behind my eyes. His voice bounces off the trees and comes back to us and for a second the whole forest is full of our grief.
Then it goes quiet.
The shouting stops and there’s nothing but our harsh bretahing and the faint rustle of wind through the pines above us.
I stare at the tree trunk. At the blood smeared across the pale bark, and I walk over to it. I look at the stains, at the dents Ryowoon’s fists have carved into the wood.
I kick it.
The jolt travels up through my shin. It hurts.
I kick it again, harder, grunting with effort.
I kick it again, again, then I’m slapping at the trunk with my open palms, smacking the bark until my skin stings and goes numb and stings again, cursing under my breath, cursing louder, cursing the machine that malfunctioned and the factory that didn’t fix it and the man who was too drunk to get out of the way and my father, my stupid, good, kind father who couldn’t just let someone else save him for once.
I kick so hard that the momentum makes me lose my balance, toppling backward.
I hit the ground hard, the impact jarring up through my tailbone and spine, and I stay there, panting, soaked through with sweat, the borrowed suit covered in pine needles and dirt.
My head drops forward, my chin against my chest and I stare at my knees and try to breathe.
Ryowoon drops down beside me. He doesn’t say anything or try to touch me or comfort me or offer any of those useless phrases adults have been feeding me for days.
He sits with his shoulder near mine, I can hear his breathing slowly coming down from that desperate heaving into something approaching normal.
I can smell pine sap and blood and the faint sourness of sweat.
We sit there long enough for the birds to come back, for the shadows to shift across the clearing as the sun moves.
Long enough for my heartbeat to settle back into my chest where it belongs instead of pounding against my skull.
The anger drains away slowly, leaving behind a hollow and exhausted feeling, almost peaceful in its emptiness.
“Stop avoiding me,” I say finally, not looking at him, flat and without any anger. “Don’t do that again.”
He’s silent for a beat.
“You’re not your father,” I say, and I mean it with everything I have. “It’s not your fault my dad’s gone.”
I turn my head then and look at him. He’s already looking at me, his eyes are red but dry, his bottom lip bitten, the blood on his hands drying in the creases of his knuckles.
“If you feel sorry,” I say, holding his gaze, “then make it up by staying beside me. That’s it. That’s how you pay my dad back.”
His throat works, the muscles in his jaw tense and release. Then he nods once, his expression set.
He gets up first, brushing off his knees, and extends a hand down to me. I take it, letting him haul me to my feet. His arm goes around my shoulder, pulling me close against his side as we turn toward the path.
“Come on,” he says, his voice still hoarse. “Let’s go down to the docks. I feel like a swim.”
I don’t argue. We walk down the hill together in our ruined suits with skinned hands and dirty knees, leaving the bloodied pine behind us. Neither of us mentions the funeral again.
Summer crawls forward. The funeral fades into the background noise of the neighborhood, folded away with the white envelopes and dried flowers and leftover banchan containers that the neighbors finally stop bringing to our door.
The whole town seems to exhale after a few weeks.
People stop lowering their voices when I walk past. The ajummas at the market go back to haggling with each other instead of pressing free bags of tangerines into my hands with pitying looks.
But they’re still careful. I can feel it in the way Jinwon’s mom squeezes my shoulder when I come over to play and holds on just a second longer than she needs to.
The way old Mr. Han at the end of the block, who yells at every kid in the neighborhood for breathing too loud, suddenly has nothing to say when I cut through his yard on the way to the docks.
Careful. Gentle. Handling me with softness.
Ryowoon doesn’t do any of that.
He shows up at the cross street between our houses every morning at the same time, hands shoved in his pockets, squinting against the early sun, and says something about what he wants to do that day with no pity, or caution, or hesitant care.
Just, “Hey, Sihyung said there’s a dead jellyfish the size of a car tire down on the south rocks, you wanna go see it?
” or “Haeil bet me I couldn’t hold my breath underwater for two minutes, come watch me prove that idiot wrong. ”
We walk down to the harbor most mornings, the two of us falling into step, my stride a little shorter, his a little looser.
The others are usually there already. Jinwon sitting on the low wall reading a book he found in the school library’s discard box, Haeil chucking pebbles at the gulls, Sihyung and Yoohan arguing about a stupid debate about which superhero could lift a boat.
We join them and the days become shapeless and sun-drenched.
We race through the woods up on the ridge, crashing through ferns and ducking branches, seeing who can scramble up the fat pine at the overlook the fastest. Ryowoon wins every time because he’s a reckless, aggressive climber, hauling himself up with bleeding palms while I’m still trying to find a foothold.
But I’m getting closer. One afternoon I make it to the second-highest branch before he reaches the top and he looks down at me, breathing hard, pine sap smeared across his cheek, and grins with all his teeth.
“Getting faster,” he says.
“You’re getting slower,” I shoot back, and he kicks a pinecone at my head.
Afternoons we spend at Mrs. Nam’s, earning our keep.
She puts us to work the same as always, restocking shelves, hauling boxes from the storage closet, sitting in the courtyard peeling garlic cloves until our fingers sting.
She pays us in twin Bars and Melona popsicles and anything else she pulls from the freezer that day, and we eat them sitting cross-legged on the warm concrete of her courtyard, trading flavors back and forth.
On good days she makes us ramyeon with an egg cracked into it, standing over the pot and swatting Ryowoon’s hand away when he tries to steal noodles before they’re done.
She doesn’t treat me any differently either, still scolds me when I track dirt into the store, still smacks the back of my head with her dish towel when I smart off.
But sometimes I catch her watching me from the doorway with a soft look on her face I pretend I don’t notice.
At home the emptiness settles in and stays.
My mom picks up extra shifts at the restaurant, covering the lunch rush and then staying through dinner service.
Some nights she picks up prep work after close, peeling and chopping for the next day, coming home so late I’m already asleep or pretending to be.
I hear the front door creak open past midnight, hear her shoes drop by the entrance, the kitchen faucet runs for a long time while she washes the smell of doenjang and cooking oil off her hands.
In the mornings I find her already gone, just a pair of slippers by the door and a note on the counter that says rice is in the cooker except sometimes it isn’t because she forgot to set it the night before.
She looks thinner in the face, hollow around the eyes.
She moves through the house like she’s treading water.
We lost my father’s income and the meager savings he had went to the funeral costs.
There’s no insurance payout coming, no pension, no safety net.
Just my mother and her hands and however many hours she can wring out of a day.
I try not to be in the house when she’s there.
It’s not that I don’t want to see her. It’s that when I do, when I catch her standing at the kitchen sink staring at nothing, her hands still in the water, or sitting at the table with the bills spread in front of her and her head in her palms, I feel this awful tightness in my chest, wanting to fix it and knowing I can’t.
Knowing there’s nothing a twelve-year-old can do about it.
So I make myself scarce. If she doesn’t have to worry about feeding me, that’s one less thing for her to do.
The fridge stays empty more often than not.
Some days there’s leftover rice and a container of kimchi and nothing else.
Mrs. Nam feeds me, or Jinwon’s mom sends me home with a container of something she just happened to make too much of, winking at me like we both don’t know what she’s doing. And Ryowoon.
Ryowoon shows up at my door one evening with a plastic bag, thrusts it at me without meeting my eyes. Inside there’s two triangle kimbap, a package of those little chocolate-filled koala cookies, and a bruised apple.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask, turning the bag over in my hands.
“Around,” he says, already pushing past me into the house.
I stare at the bag. The kimbap still has the convenience store price stickers on them, but they’re not from Mrs. Nam’s shop.
The apple has a produce sticker from the market three blocks over.
Ryowoon doesn’t have money. His father spends whatever comes in on soju and cigarettes and the horse races in Busan, and Ryowoon doesn’t get an allowance, never has, never will.
So the food came from somewhere it wasn’t paid for and we both know it, but he doesn’t say anything about it and I don’t ask.